Personal Stories Drawn From the Fire Lines : THE SOUTHLAND FIRESTORM: THE BATTLE GOES ON : Carbon Canyon: ‘Blow Winds and Crack Your Cheeks’

There are stories that you report as a journalist and then there are stories that you tell--to family, friends, maybe to your grandchildren one day.

Covering and living through disaster leaves its mark. What follows are some of the stories that Times reporters, photographers and editors usually reserve for the spoken word. They are personal. They reveal some of the fear, the close calls, the human connections that do not usually make it into print.

In my nightmare, my parents’ swimming pool is filled with soot. A deer is floating head-down in the murky water, unable to find refuge from the flames.

When I am awake on the night of the Malibu firestorm, reality is hardly more reassuring. I am safely at home in Venice and my mom and dad have fled their home in Carbon Canyon. That is the good news.

But they left just ahead of the flames. They are certain their home of 24 years is gone.

Now they are camping in my back yard with their two skittish German shepherds, who must stay outside to avoid a confrontation with our own high-strung springer spaniel.

As we all try to settle in for the night, the shepherds bay at the foul-smelling sky. Our dog yaps, our year-old son cries. A spider skitters across my face.

We’ve all spent the hours before bed thinking about the things my parents--Ford and Sheila Rainey--had to leave behind: The only pictures of my grandmother, who recently died. A silver tea set. My mother’s woodcuts, pastels and art supplies. A commission in the Continental Army, signed by John Hancock.

Veterans of several fires, my parents waited too long to evacuate their rambling ranch house. My 85-year-old father made a brave, or foolish, stand atop the roof. He later joked about the news photographers who joined him on the roof, wondering if he would make the cover of Newsweek.

“Maybe I should have recited, ‘Blow winds and crack your cheeks!’ ” he said later, laughing. My father has been an actor for 60 years. A little natural disaster wasn’t enough to make him forget his favorite line from King Lear.

But when the flames leaped inside the fence, a fire crew told him he had better move along. He dropped his hose and drove off, several minutes behind my mother, leaving the single fire engine and crew to stop the flames.

Dawn on Wednesday was a relief. With my press pass in hand, I finally felt I could do some real good. The identification got me as far as Sunset Boulevard, where I began the four-mile walk up Pacific Coast Highway to my parents’ house.

The trek gave me time to consider the place where I grew up, but where I hadn’t lived since I left for college 16 years ago. I knew the media would be talking about the rich and famous. But what I saw, and remembered, reminded me of another Malibu.

Yes, the jet set is here, as demonstrated by the Porsches and Mercedes lining PCH.

But on my way up the road I also saw a homeless woman sitting beneath some roadside bushes and staring blankly at the smoky, brown sky.

At Las Flores Drive, I was thrilled to see that Cosentino’s nursery, a local institution, had been spared. Tom Cosentino and his Italian-American family epitomized the other Malibu.

When they arrived 20 years ago from New York City, they had only a single fruit and vegetable cart. But they parlayed hard work and a winning charm into a flourishing chain of nurseries and florist shops.

A few hundred yards north, the site was not as warming. The apartment building where my aunt and uncle once lived had been swept away.

After hitching a ride on a pickup, it became clear that Carbon Canyon had earned its name. Everything on both sides was soot and ash.

Around the first bend, I saw nothing. Around the second, I saw the home of my parents’ neighbors intact.

Then I spotted the white chimney. As we got closer, I saw the gray rock roof. And then the white walls. Half a dozen other homes have burned. But my parents’ has not.

Mom and Dad are going home.